Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with all its attendant moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses how places are made through stories of four diverse public and private sector working environments.The book provides a unique insight for educators, students and researchers into the everyday lives of planners and those in associated built environment occupations. This exceptional account of the micro-politics of a knowledge-intensive profes...

Winner of the Royal Town Planning Institute Patsy Healey Award for Academic Excellence 2025.Spatial planning is at a crossroads, with government reform undermining the traditional vision of state-employed planners making decisions about urban development in a unified public interest. Nearly half of UK planners are now employed in the private sector, with complex inter-relations between the sectors including supplying outsourced services to local authorities struggling with centrall...

Government attempts in recent years to create a national system of vocational education and training have marked a profound shift both in educational policy and in underlying concepts of what education is for. Relations between schools and the working world are changing all the time and the implementation of ideas of vocationalism has forced a blurring of the time-honoured boundaries between educations concerned with concepts and training, or with skills. The challenge now is to define how...

Corporate social responsibility has been defined as 'the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society'. Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) just window dressing or is it a contradiction in terms? In this Very Short Introduction, Jeremy Moon shows that CSR holds much more value than it first appears, and shows how it has come of age in recent years. Illustrating the sorts of CSR investments companies make, the ways in which they practice CSR, and the challenges t...

HR functions within both internal and external contexts. The understanding of both contexts is crucial for comprehending how and why they drive HR strategies and practices in organizations, as well as the rules and structures within which they work. Built around five major themes which impact upon the HR function, and mapping to the CIPD Level 7 Advanced module of the same name, Human Resource Management in Context enables students to understand the complex and ch...

The model answers provide candidates with ideas that they can use in their own essays, as well as a variety of topic-specific vocabulary and appropriate grammatical structures. The 101 model answers are divided into 10 broad topic areas, such as education and technology.

In the past ten years, Canadians have witnessed a renaissance in the delivery of government services. New service organizations are cropping up across the country and accomplishing extraordinary things. Efforts are being made to consult citizens on how to improve and integrate services. Considerable resources are being invested in measuring and showcasing performance improvement.This book probes the central dimensions of service reform efforts from a variety of perspectives and ans...

The shift from the model of central government educational control to school- based management has been widely adopted and acclaimed and has created the general impression of increased democracy and participation.; The international contributors to this book tackle this important policy issue and look behind the scenes of the moves towards school self- management. They investigate the phenomenon of the self-managing school, Why It Is Happening Now, What Is The Truth Behind This Notion And ...

What makes a global corporation give away its prized intellectual property? Why are Ivy League universities allowing anyone to take their courses for free? What drives a farmer in rural Africa to share his secrets with his competitors?A collection of hactivists, hobbyists, forum-users and maverick leaders are leading a quiet but unstoppable revolution. They are sharing everything they know, and turning knowledge into action in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Driven b...

"Amidst a thousand tirades against the excesses and waste of consumer society, [this book] offers us something genuinely new and invigorating: a way out." —Steven Johnson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Infernal MachineA groundbreaking and original book, What's Mine is Yours articulates for the first time the roots of "collaborative consumption," the authors' term for the technology-based peer communities that are transforming th...

Over the past ten years there has been a massive growth in call centres worldwide. These centres are said to represent the most dynamic growth area in white-collar employment internationally since the mid 1990s. Yet the footloose and global nature of the industry means that jobs will always be susceptible to outsourced operations, ICT developments, public sector subsidization of business restructuring and re-location, and cheaper operations elsewhere. This book conducts a thorough analysis...

This timely book provides a systematic overview and critique of contemporary approaches to educational change from some of the best-known writers and scholars in the field, including Andy Hargreaves, Larry Cuban, Ivor Goodson, Jeannie Oakes, Milbrey McLaughlin, Judyth Sachs and Ann Liebermann.Divided into four sections, the book addresses the key themes:What has been the impact of educational change?How has the impact differed in differen...